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Follow UsRed Hat has over the last few years, established itself as the de facto standard distribution of Linux. So a new edition of the distribution tends to attract some interest. Red Hat Linux 7.1 is doubly interesting because it is Red Hat’s first 2.4 kernel based
version.
Red Hat’s release patterns also indicate that 7.1 merits examination. Over the last few iterations, Red Hat’s point-zero releases have been buggy, if not broken
Installation
Red Hat’s installation tool anaconda will be familiar to users of Red Hat 6.x. It offers two easy modes of operation–text based and graphical. New users will probably want to choose the graphical install.
Experienced users can choose to create custom partitioning schemes and remote authentication schemes. Custom partitioning is usually necessary when Red Hat Linux has to be installed along side other OSs. Fortunately, Red Hat’s partitioning tool Disk Druid is quite intuitive and Linux inter-operates well with other OSs. Currently, Linux provides complete access to Windows partitions on FAT16 and FAT32 file systems and read-only access to.
Windows partitions on NTFS.
New in the 7.1 install is a Laptop install class, which presumably installs a configuration optimized for laptops. I appreciated another new feature of the install–firewall configuration. The install offers three canned firewall configurations–High, Medium and No firewall. Users can switch between these settings after installation using the setup tool. The tool allows limited customization of the settings, but users with specialized requirements might not find it useful. This feature will be useful to users who have security concerns but find the complexities of ipchains rules beyond them.
Environments
As usual, Red Hat offers Gnome as its default desktop environment, but unlike with earlier versions, you can change this default. The shipped version is not current–version 1.2 against 1.4. Thus, it will hold no surprises for existing users of Gnome. KDE 2.1 is also bundled as an alternative. This is a huge upgrade over 1.x, which was available with earlier editions of Red Hat. KDE’s built-in browser Konqueror alone is probably worth the upgrade.
RHL 7.1 gives you an option to install Gnome (by default), KDE 2.1, or both. Choosing only KDE produces surprising (for Red Hat) results–no Gnome libraries or related utilities are installed.
Also available are window managers like Enlightenment and Windowmaker, which offer numerous features but are probably more suited to the more experienced user.
I would recommend using the switchdesk utility to set KDE as the desktop. In this release at least, it is by far the best desktop environment.
Server components
True to its conservative philosophy, Red Hat does not ship bleeding edge versions of its server components. Shipped with Red Hat Linux 7.1 is the Samba 2.0.7. Even though not the latest version of Samba it is a mature implementation of the SMB protocol for Unix machines. This allows Linux to be a file server for Windows clients.
For e-mail, Sendmail 8.11.2 provides industrial strength SMTP services probably routing the vast majority of all mail. In this version, Sendmail adds support for secure SMTP using the TLS protocol in addition to numerous security and performance enhancements.
Another pillar, Apache 1.3.
19–the most widely used Web server, is Red Hat’s default Web server. This is the latest stable release of Apache. A new feature in this version of Apache is support for dynamic loading of Apache modules–optimizing resource usage.
Freely available with Red Hat 7.1 are server programs. A short listing will have to include both MySql and Postgresql RDBMSs, Squid proxy server, BIND for DNS, and Mars-NWE for NetWare file and print serving.
The Internet is becoming an increasingly unfriendly place. With that in mind, Red Hat ships secure versions of most servers. For example, IMAPS and POP3S are servers that support IMAP and POP3 connections over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). In addition, Red Hat Linux supports the Kerberos protocol for secure authentication.
The remarkable thing about Red Hat Linux is that it includes components that can do almost any task. Most proprietary OSs would require extensive purchases of third party applications to reach the functionality offered by a default install of Red Hat Linux.
Kernel
This is the first edition of Red Hat to include the 2.4.x Linux kernel. The specific version that comes with Red Hat Linux 7.1 is a patched version of 2.4.2 that includes patches found only in later production kernels (2.4.3 or later). This version of the Linux kernel introduces a host of changes.
For the first time it has a full-fledged resource management (plug-and-play) subsystem. Now PCI and ISAPNP devices will be automatically configured by the kernel. Red Hat provides a user-space tool Kudzu to manage the PnP process. Kudzu probes for new or removed devices at boot up and starts the auto-configuration process. The kernel also supports a wider range of devices than before. This includes devices that connect using the Universal
Serial Bus (USB).
The kernel has a number of enhancements aimed at enterprise users. It is more scalable, having a configurable process limit and support for an increased number of users and groups–4.2 billion in fact. The kernel supports so-called enterprise hardware–up to 16 GB of RAM, 16 NICs, and 10 IDE interfaces.
Although there is no opportunity during the installation to install them, Red Hat 7.1 comes with support for two new additions to the Linux kernel: ReiserFS and LVM. ReiserFS is a journaling file system–it keeps a log of all modifications to the file system. This log is used to rapidly and accurately reconstruct data on a file system damaged in case of a power loss or accidental shutdown.
The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a feature common on proprietary Unixs. It places an abstraction layer between the OS’s file system drivers and the partitions on the physical hard disk. This allows file systems to span disks, be resized, and managed in a more flexible way.
Both ReiserFS and LVM are extremely useful to administrators. It is unfortunate therefore that there is no easy way to install and administer them on Red Hat Linux 7.1.
A new firewalling mechanism, called Netfilter, has been added to the Linux kernel. In addition to increased manageability, Netfilter brings stateful firewalling to Linux. The older firewall mechanism, ipchains, was a stateless firewall–it examines each packet in isolation and decides to allow or deny it. Netfilter, however, examines each packet in the context of the connection that it originated from. This enables it to detect a range of intrusions that ipchains could not. For those of you with significant investments in ipchains firewalls, the 2.4.x kernel has a compatibility module for ipchains rules. On Red Hat Linux, ipchains is still the default firewalling tool.
Red Hat also ships a version of the kernel that supports symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP). This is vital in the enterprise computing market. SMP on the 2.4 kernel is optimized for eight processors, but can support up to sixteen. Also included are tools for creating computational (as opposed to fail-safe) clusters using Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) technology. Beowulf supercomputing clusters are built on PVM technology.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, Red Hat Linux 7.1 is a both a great product and a compelling upgrade. It offers an extraordinary amount
of state-of-the-art functionality right out of the box. Functionalities like mail serving, firewalling and clustering would require expensive third-party utilities to implement on say, Windows 2000. The cost savings alone would argue Red Hat’s case.
For existing users of Red Hat Linux, 7.1 is a compelling upgrade. For desktop users KDE 2x and Konqueror make the upgrade worthwhile. For enterprise users, the increased scalability and functionality offered by the 2.4 kernel make Red Hat Linux 7.1 a must-have upgrade.